Kobayashi Kiyochika

Kobayashi Kiyochika was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, best known for his ukiyo-e colour woodblock prints and newspaper illustrations. His work documents the rapid modernization and Westernization Japanese underwent during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and employs a sense of light and shade called kōsen-ga inspired by Western art techniques. His work first found an audience in the 1870s with prints of red-brick buildings and trains that had proliferated after the Meiji Restoration; his prints of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 were also popular. Woodblock printing fell out of favour during this period, and many collectors consider Kobayashi's work the last significant example of ukiyo-e. During the Boshin War in 1868 Kiyochika participated on the side of the shogun in the Battle of Toba–Fushimi in Kyoto and returned to Osaka after defeat of the shogun's forces. He returned by land to Edo and re-entered the employ of the shogun. After the fall of Edo he relocated to Shizuoka, the heartland of the Tokugawa clan, where he stayed for the next several years. Kiyochika returned to the renamed Tokyo in May 1873 with his mother, who died there that September. He began to concentrate on art and associated with such artists as Shibata Zeshin and Kawanabe Kyōsai, under whom he may have studied painting. In 1875 he began producing series of ukiyo-e prints of the rapidly modernizing and Westernizing Tokyo and is said to have studied Western-style painting under Charles Wirgman.